Duke Researchers Send Touch Sensations into the Brain

More advances in mind-machine interfaces this week. MIguel Nicolelis (a pioneer in neural interfaces) and colleagues announced that they were able to send touch sensory data into the brains of monkeys.

So the tally is now:

Vision: In and out

Sound: In

Motion: Out

Touch: In

From New Scientist:

Monkeys have feelings too. In a mind-meld between monkey and computer, rhesus macaques have learned to “feel” the texture of virtual objects without physically touching a thing. In the future, prosthetic limbs modelled on similar technology could return a sense of touch to people with amputations.

Using two-way communication between brain and machine, the monkeys manoeuvred a cursor with their minds and identified virtual objects by texture, based on electrical feedback from the computer